


But we'll defy the rules until we die

by AgapantoBlu



Series: There's a monster in my mirror [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: And the character seems to be seeking pain for a while, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Identity Issues, POV Second Person, Pidge left Earth a kid and came back a woman, Returning Home, Tattooed!Pidge, Tattoos, There's one (1) mention of self-harm, self claiming, song-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 11:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14894165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: There’s a tattoo parlor just on the other side of the street. A burly woman with full colored sleeves comes out yelling a warning to the drunkard, but your mind brushes her aside with just a flicker of amusement. She thinks you need protecting? How cute.“I’m notpretty,—” you say, lifting your head slowly toward the man’s face, meeting his sneer with a coldness of your own. The wave of energy in your chest is rumbling at unison with your lion’s roar, “—and I’m not athing.”-So let's be sinners to be saints,and let's be winners by mistake.The world may disapprove,but my world is only you.(Laurent Aquilina - "Sinners")





	But we'll defy the rules until we die

**Author's Note:**

> Do I have a tattoo kink? Probably. Do I have tattoos? Yeah. Do I want more? Also yeah.
> 
> Give me tattooed badass adult Pidge.

 

 

**_Our lives are stories, waiting to be told;  
in search of silver linings, we discovered gold._ **

Breaching the Garrison's security hadn’t been hard when you were fourteen and looking for your family; it’s as easy as breathing now that you’re eighteen and a war veteran.

(It’s probably easier than breathing, actually, because lately sometimes air feels thicker than mud as it struggles down your throat, in your lungs,  _suffocating_.)

It’s weird to be sitting on your bed rather than a space ship deck. The mattress is soft rather than cold, the sounds coming in from the window are passing cars and human voices and are nothing like Coran’s and Lance’s shrilly banters as they bicker and try to rope someone along with their plans. You can hear steps coming up behind your closed door, but your mom is not Shiro and she doesn’t knock and she doesn’t come in. You half resent her for that.

Your dad has his own quarters within the Garrison, which you translate to a-slightly-nicer-than-a-real-cell cell, and only your brother gets to visit him. You’re quite surprised they haven’t apprehended Matt too, but maybe they’re trying to avoid the backslash. Shiro’s arrest already made enough of an impression to the public, after all.

And you? You’re an eighteen years old traumatized girl. Who cares about what you say?, what you do? Nobody is going to listen.

Nobody is going to listen, but you’ve learnt to do on your own and, God, you can make a mess if you want to.

The Garrison’s archives are empty of datas. 

 

**_And judgement taught us that our hearts were wrong,_ **  
**_but they're the ones that we'll look down upon._**

 

Humans are alien to you, as of lately. You watch the news and wonder how they can waste so much time and energy in hating each others when the universe is packed full of creatures that could tear any of you apart with a careless gesture of the wrist. It seems preposterous, of them, to act as if the only threat to their survival is themselves. 

Your mom wakes up at seven every morning to find you sitting at a table set for eight. The first days, she asked; now, she just picks six and puts them away and you look at her and wonder if she really believes you to be crazy or if she knows what you’re doing.

Matt comes downstairs the last. You’re under no delusion that he might be getting any more sleep than you, but he at least pretends. For mom, or for dad, or for you. You don’t know. You don’t really care.

He sits in front of you, eats his cereals silently as you let yours soak until they turn into a disgustingly mushy thing. It’s not green, but it’s as close as you can get to the space goo.

Once upon a time, you’d yell at Hunk for touching your stuff, at Lance for being a perv, you’d make Keith’s impersonation because he’s  _so unironically emo_ and you’d smile angelically up to Shiro as you cashed in on being his unofficial favorite to get out of a scolding. Now you silently resent your mother for not getting the hint of how much you  _need_ them, need them now, here, with you,  _your family._

Matt promises to say  _hi_  to dad for you. You tell him if you wanted visiting hours you could have left him with the Galra. 

Your mother yells at you, outraged.

Your brother has decades of tiredness in his eyes, and he nods slowly at you because he  _gets it_. You’re sorry he does. 

“They’re not here, Katie,” your mother whispers when the door closes behind Matt and you abandon your bowl to climb back upstairs, to your den. “You’re not going to wake up back in space any moment now.”

You’re not sure if she means it to be a reassurance. 

It doesn’t feel like one.

 

**_The rules say our emotions don't comply,_ **  
**_but we'll defy the rules until we die._**

 

To be honest, breaking the rules is your thing, so you wonder why people keep giving some to you. When will they learn? It doesn’t take that high of an IQ. Shiro and Allura got it, and that’s why they took turns physically dragging you to bed to sleep and Hunk and Lance forced you into socializing with the locals and Keith always came to you when he was down to make someone’s life miserable. Even Kolivan had been wary of you, after that one time he asked you to try and hacker the base’s defenses to see if you could find any weakness. 

_If._ More like,  _how many._

Your mother tells you, _listen to the therapist_ , and you hack his files and find out there was nothing about psychology in his curriculum up until three days after your first message to Earth.

Your therapist says, _don’t hold onto your old routine, don’t think about your friends, try to build yourself without them_. And you send a virus to every device he has. You make it so that porn pictures fill the cache of his Garrison provided laptop. You make his fire-alarm go off every two days.

Shiro tells you, _don’t worry_ , as they bring him away in chains, so you do just that. 

The first night you Skype him, Lance answers you from inside his closet. “Thought you’ve long since been out,” you joke, and he chokes on a spilled sob, an half laughter. You know he wanted to keep his breakdown for Hunk, to be stronger just for you, but you can see the tear tracks down his cheeks and bags under his eyes. You think there might be a pimple on his chin, which is honestly devastating to even think about.

Lance says, _don’t mind me_. You do, you mind. You get a face mask sent to Cuba with a note saying “don’t fucking skip your skin routine, asshole”. It never comes, and you know the Garrison stopped it.

Hunk chatters about projects, but it’s hard to get hyped about human technology after tampering with the Altean. And there’s no way that either of you will reveal anything about how that stuff works when you  _know_ the Garrison is listening in on every word of yours. 

Keith looks tired, helpless, when you call him. Almost dazedly, he outstretches his hand to touch the screen, where you imagine your face is, and it breaks something inside you. He says “ _Pidge_ ” and you smile at him, as soft as you can. You talk about cryptids and government conspiracies just to pull the leg of whoever is on the other end of your screens, checking on you. 

One night, you almost say, “ _There’s no war in Ba Sing-Se_ ” but you fear the reference may pass right above Keith’s head and reach only your surveillant, which would defeat the whole purpose of it. Instead, you pull up the blue fuzzy blanket you bought in a moment of weakness, curl yourself in it, and nonchalantly mutter, “ _We’re all safe and warm here._ ”

His eyes sparkle in recognition of Lance’s tale, and his jaw hardens as he nods. 

Every time you close a call, you can feel a thousand pounds of chains falling on you, dragging you under.

_You can’t live your life attached at the hip with those guys, you're an adult now_ , someone tells you. A relative, someone you haven’t seen in years, coming to visit you after your miraculous return, feeling entitled to teaching you how to live their same bland life in the rules of Earthlings. You're an adult, though, so you put laxative in their plate.

Who do they think they are?

 

**_So let's be sinners to be saints, and let's be winners by mistake._**  
**_The world may disapprove, but my world is only you._**  
**_And if we're sinners, then it feels like heaven to me._**

 

It’s like a scratch, you’d say. A buzzing current under your skin, prickling, making you shiver at odd moments and fight the impulse to dig your nails in your forearms and drag, but you don’t, because self-harming is irrational. It isn’t functional, and it’s highly counterproductive. You can’t be weak or hurting, you must be vigil at all hours, because what if  _they come back, what if they attack, you need to be ready at all times._

Your mom freaks out often, now. You’re not normal for her, not anymore. You write in Altean, you mutter Galran curses, you code programs that won’t fit any Earth device. And you hurt, hurt,  _hurt, you want it to_.

One night, you take all your clothes out of your wardrobe. Methodically, you try them on, take them off and then cut them to pieces with a pair of scissors. The dresses are too impractical, the t-shirts aren’t protective enough. You end up with an handful of sturdy jeans and a few sweaters big enough to fit a Kevlar vest under them.

Your mom freaks out again when she finds it in the mail.

Lance would laugh, Hunk would sigh, Keith would give you an awkward thumb up. Shiro wouldn’t react at all because you wouldn’t tell him,  _duh_ , he’s the closest thing to parental surveillance you had on the castle-ship _._ Matt watches you hide it under your mattress and he has  _this look_  in his eyes.

He hugs you. You let him, even if his arms are too light around your body.

You miss the grounding weight of Shiro’s prosthetic on your shoulders. You miss him so bad.

 

**_You showed me feelings I've never felt before._ **  
**_We're making enemies, knocking on the devil's door._**

You run away from home every other week. You never go far and you’re not technically under house arrest, but you sneak out of the window every time anyway. The first times, your mom used to blow your phone up with calls as soon as she found out you were gone, but after the first month she gave up.

When you run, you go downtown. There’s a bar the, The Second Star, where the Garrison cadets hung out when they’re on leave or sneak out. Lance used to be a regular here, and you sometimes sit on a stool and imagine him flirting. You laugh at nothing, by yourself, because you know he’d be horrible at it, and Hunk would be quietly suffering of second-hand embarrassment somewhere at a table.

One day, a month and a half after you landed on Earth and the Garrison apprehended Shiro to verify whether or not he could be considered responsible for the four of you, minors, being dragged into an intergalactic war, you find a picture of that dumbass on the wall. It takes you by surprise, because never in your life you’d expect the Golden Boy of the Garrison to go to a seedy place like this. It downright shocks you, because in the picture Shiro’s downing the third shot of a line of seven, each a different and more worrying color, as Matt smirks and holds a banner behind him, reading  _7th Broken Record_ in bright purple glitter.

Shiro was so much younger and thinner there. He had black hair, an unmarred nose and a soft, carefree edge to his lips even as they were pulled in a disgusted face at the taste of whatever Matt had come up with.

He looks so relaxed and happy, you think you’ve never seen him so in the whole time you’ve been with him in space.

You run away without looking back, but the picture is there in your brain, burned, branded. Your heart soars with renewed hatred for Zarkon, for Haggar, for every single Galra that contributed to turning that dumb teenager in the scarred soldier you’ve met. Your brain flashes you a picture of Ulaz, and you feel tears prickle at your eyes. 

_Stop being dumb!_ , your brain screams. You used to be colder than this, you used to be rational. You never asked for all these feelings, for the pain and irrationality of them. Who dared to infected you with those?! You blame Lance. You blame Hunk, Keith, Shiro and the bond. You blame Allura and Coran and the pods. You blame Green, and the Olkari.

You sob so hard you lose sight of where you are, running turn after turn without a care. What’s the big deal if you even get lost? The guys will come and find you, they always do. They did so on enemy ships, why wouldn’t they here?!

_Because you're an adult now, deal with it. Because they can’t. Because the Garrison lied about Matt and Dad and Shiro, and about Keith, and about you and Hunk and Lance. Because they took Shiro and put you all under a glass bell. Fuck the Garrison, fuck them, fuck them._

You slam into something hard before you can register the obstacle moving out of a corner. You’re familiar with the feeling of a bigger body of flesh popping out of nowhere to stop you, but this is less fuzzy and armored, more sweaty and stinking of beer.

“Hey, there. Where’s such a pretty thing like you going in such a hurry?"

 

_**But how can you expect me not to eat,** _  
_**when the forbidden fruit tastes so sweet?** _

 

Somehow, out of everything, is the word that gets you and makes you stop moving past the man. 

It’s not like you don’t think you are  _pretty._ You were a kid when you left Earth, but even so Lance has called you that plenty of times during face-mask nights. Matt uses it when he brushes your hair. Your whole team had been generous of the word in those few occasions in which you’ve indulged into wearing some of Allura’s simplest dresses, and you’ve liked that. But the point is,  _pretty_ is a word that only your family is allowed to call you. 

For everybody else, you’re  _fierce_ , you’re  _dangerous_ , you’re  _strong_ and  _brave_ and  _a hacker_ and  _a Paladin._ You’re the reason the whole universe looks at humans and says,  _better not to get involved with those, they’re dangerous, don’t you know all the Paladins of Voltron are humans?, don’t you know the Galra's Champion too?, don’t get on a human’s bad side._

Something that you’ve been missing dearly awakens with a grumble in your chest. It’s the same feeling as when you wore the Olkari headband for the first time, when you deepened your bond with your lion enough to feel the whole world, every single minuscule particle of it, shift  _for you_. It makes your heart soar so loud the voice in your head calling this a bad idea is hastily drowned.

You are so much more than  _pretty_.

There’s a tattoo parlor just on the other side of the street. A burly woman with full colored sleeves comes out yelling a warning to the drunkard, but your mind brushes her aside with just a flicker of amusement. She thinks you need protecting? How cute.

“I’m not  _pretty_ ,—” you say, lifting your head slowly toward the man’s face, meeting his sneer with a coldness of your own. The wave of energy in your chest is rumbling at unison with your lion’s roar, “—and I’m not a  _thing_.”

You dislocate both his shoulders before the echo of Green fades from your mind.

 

**_So let's be sinners to be saints, and let's be winners by mistake._ **

There’s no police to call when you’re a tiny girl who beat up a burly man; somehow humans see shame in what most alien races have grown to expect from you. The thought is only worth a shrug as you’re too busy relishing in the low purr at the back of your mind, the protectiveness running in your every fiber. 

The woman from the tattoo parlor, Sanna, invited you in and now you sit on a stool, watching her clean her stuff and idly letting your gaze wander on the designs hanging from the walls. Some of those are really pretty, especially the flower compositions. Green purrs an assent in your mind.

Sanna shakes her head with a hint of amusement written on the lines of her face when you say so. “You like 'em because you’re a force of nature yourself, girl,” she jokes.

Your laughter is only slightly on the hysteric side. 

The buzzing under your skin comes back, the desperate need for something you can’t have. Those sounds like words Shiro would tell you and you would make fun of together with the others in the lounge room, because they’re so  _Space Dad_.

There’s a picture on the wall of an assortment of colorful flowers. You can’t take your eyes off of it.

**_The world may disapprove, but my world is only you_ **  
**_And if we're sinners, then it feels like heaven to me_ **

 

Allura left you all on Earth with some emergency money, and you’re somehow not surprised that the Princess’ concept of ' _a little_ ' roughly approximates to ' _a shit-ton_ ' in English. You never planned on spending it all, and you’re probably not really planning much even as you pocket the credit card and take off from a kitchen’s window once again.

It’s two months after your landing when you get your first tattoo.

You studied it carefully, and you had Matt help you draw the singular symbols even without telling him why. The five circles with the marks of each individual lion stare at you through the thin paper even as Sanna studies them.

“Where do you want ‘em?”

Black on the back of your neck; Green on your left shoulder facing the side, and Red on your right one; Blue on your hip where your waist joins your thigh and Yellow specularly. You’re Voltron, and you want to remember it.

 

**_Our hearts are too ruthless to break, let's start fires for heaven’s sake._ **

You wish it hurt more. You know that in the past decades they used needles to inject the ink straight under the skin, but now it is a laser thing that does the job and the pain is much more similar to a mild sunburn, gone and healed in a couple of days, than anything else.  

You think they still do it with needles on the islands like Hawaii or Samoa, where it’s more of a ritual thing than an aesthetic thing. You want to ask Hunk to do it to you, but you know you won’t. The point is for it to hurt, and Hunk would never hurt you; he’d just get worried at how much you crave pain now that you’re not hopping into a pod with a broken bone every other week.

As it is, you’re back to Sanna’s place in a week. She doesn’t look surprised, as you hand her a piece of paper with a few designs and a sentence on it. “I also want a golden sun,” you say. “On my right calf.”

Sanna nods. “And where do you want these?”

Your father’s quote,  _do something that will make the world stop and take notice_ , goes on your left calf. Rover’s pyramid shape goes behind your right ear, where the skull bone protrudes a bit.

That one hurts a bit more, but it’s gone so fast and it’s still not enough.

 

_**Our hearts are too ruthless to break, let's start fires for heaven’s sake.**_

 

Your friends don’t notice. You don’t resent them, it’s hard through Skype and your now slightly longer bangs to see the tattoos behind your neck and ear, and the others are always covered in clothes, but it makes you uneasy. You want to show them, you want to  _show off_ , but there’s something that still doesn’t fit, like an equation that doesn’t add up. 

One night, when you catch yourself browsing the internet for new designs, you realize what it is that feels so weird.

It’s  _incomplete_. Somehow, someway, something is missing and you feel it. You wonder, what it is? Green roars in your brain.

Next time you show up to Sanna’s, you have a list of names in your hand. “Can you make them look solemn?”

Sanna nods. “Where?”

On your right arm, stretching on the thick bicep, blooms a list of numbers. Coordinations. Sector of the universe; universe quadrant; galaxy; solar system; planet; your home’s longitude and latitude. 

Down your left arm, that same night, scroll the names of fallen heroes. It starts with  _Alfor_ ,  _Trigen_ ,  _Blaytz_  and  _Gyrgan_ ; it follows with  _Ulaz_ ,  _Thace_ ,  _Antok_ ,  _Regris_. Underneath, you place the names of Matt’s comrades too, and you think about his eyes shimmering with tears when he spelled them out for you, as you let Sanna seal their memory in your flesh.

There’s still something missing, but this feels much more like closure.

**_Our hearts are too ruthless to break, let's start fires for heaven’s sake_ _._**

 

They think you’re stupid, it’s the only possibility. They think you won’t realize they’re not really interested in letting Shiro see the light of sun ever again, that they want something else, that they’re  _lying. to. your. face. again._

You leave the Garrison after the umpteenth unsuccessful attempt at meeting with an official to receive explanations, and this time you take a bus straight to Sanna’s.

During the drive, you hack past the Garrison spying software with your tablet, that might or might not have some Olkari upgrade here and there, but who cares. You call one of Lance’s siblings, and when he gets your friend to you, you’re ready to bawl in your seat. 

“ _Pidgey!_ ” God, you missed talking to him freely so much.

Before he can freak out, you tell him, “Something is wrong with Shiro’s trial.” Now he can freak out for a good reason. 

Lance doesn’t though. In the video-call, his eyes morph the way they do when he starts taking aim for a shot. It’s a terrifying kind of single-minded focus and ruthlessness. “ _What do we do?,_ ” he asks, as if there is no other option.

You guess there isn’t, and you tell him how to invent a good reason to explain coming to the States, suddenly, and how to lose the trackers on him as soon as he gets here.

When the bus approaches your stop, you close the call with heavy heart and you jump off. Your skin is buzzing again today, but it’s not the need to hurt.

This time, you show Sanna five different flowers and a drawing of Green’s muzzle. You spend the day in the shop, watching her work on the design, making sketches of the placements on a sticky figure. When it’s over, you watch it and you think,  _almost_.

Sanna gets started on it that very night. She’s taken a liking to you and something, maybe your frenzy or the complexity of this, makes her lips pull into an excited smirk as she prepares for the real thing. “This is gonna be great,” she says.

You answer, “I fucking know."

**_Our hearts are too ruthless to break._ **

 

It takes almost a month for Lance to finish preparing to move back to the States and getting all the authorizations, and you talk to Hunk and you find another couple of weeks ahead the perfect date to act. You talk with Keith and he looks withering, desperate, and you want to tell him all but you can’t. You hack the Garrison and they’re planning a surgery of some kind, but they wrote down no info about who should be subjected to it, which scares you all the way to Hell and back. 

By the week before Lance and Hunk landing, Sanna’s masterpiece is complete.

Now, there are green vines curling on the whole surface of your back, shoulders to the back of your thighs, and their branches curl and twirl around each others so that if you look at the full picture, you find Green staring back at you from the depth of the forest. They reach for your front, and _bloom_.

There are black tulips resting on your shoulders, a grounding strength to recognize the  _fame_ Shiro earned. There are cherry blossoms on your breasts, around your nipples, to celebrate Allura’s  _beauty_. Red carnations cover the whole expanse of your ribcage, depicting your  _admiration_ for Keith. Three huge, soft-looking, tiger lilies cover your belly and belly-button, yellow as bright as your  _pride_ for Hunk. A waterfall of little Forget-Me-Not’s peppers your thighs like tiny stars in  _memory_  of everything that is Lance.

You can feel it all coming together, falling in place, every speck of cosmic dust reaching out, to form something bigger, more,  _grand_.

It’s almost perfect.

 

**_So let's be sinners to be saints, and let's be winners by mistake._ **

It’s Keith who gets to call you, somehow. Or better, he calls Lance’s brother as you’re too busy having the life hugged out of you by your old Garrison buddies, both quite insistent into knowing why the fuck you are covered in bandages. 

You ignore them to steal the phone, to hear Keith, to feel the almost completion of your family coming together once again.

You have a plan. Of fucking course, what are you, an amateur? But you’ll need Keith and you tell him to join you tomorrow, before returning the phone to Marco, Lance’s brother, and take off from the Second Star.

“Wait, why? Where are you going? Pidge, come on, communication is the key!”

“Buddy, stop trying to Shiro the situation, it’s weird not to hear you scream out your nerves.”

You smile at the dumb idiots from the door. “I’ll get Matt,” and something else. “I’ll be back tomorrow before Keith arrives. I can’t disappear now or they’ll get suspicious.”

It’s all true, and eventually you’ll go get Matt and bring him over, but tonight you have somewhere to be first.

Sanna only smirks when you show up at her shop well past closing time. “What do you want now, lad?” She arches a brow. “Soon enough there won’t be any skin left to color, you know.”

“I need a tiny thing on my face,—” you tell her, and then you point at your head, “—and an hair-cut.”

The woman shrugs. “If it ain’t something fancy, I can do it.”

It isn’t fancy.

You leave the shop with an undercut, the mop of hair a the top of your head falling messily on the buzzed sides, and a big patch on you left cheekbone, covering the healing Altean mark in Coran’s color with the addition of some lines like an Olkarian microchip raising upward toward your eye and falling downward at your nose height.

Your mom doesn’t question the new patch that night. You don’t know if it’s because she just stopped caring or if she’s just so used to it she doesn’t even notice when there’s some new bandage on you.

Matt notices. He hasn’t seen your tattoos yet, but you promise you’ll show him. “Just not tonight,” you say. “When the others are there too.”

You don’t sleep that night, but you sneak out together next morning and you meet Keith and, gosh, did you miss that emo asshole.

He and the others ask about your hair and the patches once, but you wave the questions away with a hand.  _Later_ , you tell them as you type furiously on your computer. When you have Shiro back.

It’s just a matter of time, now.

 

**_The world may disapprove, but my world is only you._ **

You just want to say, the Garrison should have expected it. You don’t just become a Defender of the Universe overnight without any kind of competence or skill. 

“Actually,” Shiro wheezes, his voice coming in rasps that force you all to sit around him, if you want to hear his words over the noise of the pod engine. Which is, like, really not a problem at all. You’d be sitting in his lap even if you were in the quietest corner of the desert. “That’s kinda what we did?” 

You want to elbow him, but Hunk and Keith just talked him down a panic attack as you picked the locks to his handcuffs and chains and you think he deserves a break.

Krolia mutters something that has Lance, in the co-pilot seat, nod and press a few buttons. You think about how okay Keith was in relishing the cloche to someone else and you bury yourself in your tablet, checking the news feed, to hide your smile.

Steps approach you, and you look up to realize your sharpshooter was allowed to join the dogpile now and is doing so with a grin on his lips.

He sits down in front of Shiro to gently massage the newborn bruise for the chains on his ankle, and he points at you. “Give us some credit, boss! Pidgey here achieved long distance with her lion since we’ve been to Earth, you know? Ah, I wish I had that.”

You roll your eyes, indifferent to Shiro’s soft noise of awed surprise. “You  _do have_  achieved long distance too. Red is just too prissy to get over the fact that you dumped her in a puddle and is still giving you the silent treatment.”

“I  _know,_ she’s so bratty sometimes! But it’s okay, she’s a spit-fire in name and fact and I love her very much."

Your snort is ugly and everybody laughs at that. You missed this. 

A hand pokes at the bandage still on your cheek, and you slap it away to recognize the consequent yelp as Matt’s. That dumbass.

“Come on! I wanna see!”

Shiro looks more grounded to himself, and you realize so because he picks you up by the waist as if still, four years later, you weight absolutely nothing to him. He turns you around to see what Matt was talking about and you know the moment he spots the bandages because his shoulders go stiff and his eyes wide.

You panic, and say, “Now don’t get mad, you didn’t have the exclusive on the buzz-cut.”

He blinks. You think it takes him a moment to realize your hair are now much more similar to his before Kerberos. It’s his time to snort now.

“You look nice,” he mutters, pulling at your fringe. “Very pretty.”

It sounds so different when your family says it, indeed. It feels safe and supportive and it makes you smile gently.

“Yeah, yeah, she rocks it, whatever. I wanna see what’s the deal with all this stuff!” Lance prods in, his fingers making grabby motions at the peeking bandages.

“You didn’t get hurt, right?” Hunk immediately jumps in. “Oh shit, are you hurt?! Did we make you go on a rescue mission while hurt?! Do we need to tell Coran to get a pod ready?! We don’t even have a communication channel with the castle here! Wait, if you give me your tablet I can build something real quick and—“

“Keep your paws off my tablet,” damn, you’re already regretting getting these assholes back in your life. (You really don’t.)

With a long, suffering sigh which is mainly just for show, you put your tablet down — on Keith’s side of Shiro, not Hunk’s — and you make a show of standing up and moving just a two steps from them. Lance turns to face you and you have all your boys’ attention now.

You snort at the thought, then you pull the hem of your shirt and take it off.

 

_**And if we're sinners, then it feels like heaven to me.** _

 

You’ve seen each others’ bare bodies plenty of times in the past four years and so many of those occasions included blood or broken bones or potential death enough to take every vague impression of sexualization from the experiences. You’ve showered with Keith to save time and water, and shared a blanket naked with Shiro when you got stranded on a planet during a storm. Hunk cuddled you when you started getting your period, with all the consequent pain, and Lance tentatively taught you the mechanics of an internal tampon from what he learnt from his sisters. 

Seriously, the last of your issues is stripping to your underwear in front of them, and you’re not surprised that none of them seems to be making a big deal out of it. After four months, you feel just the same camaraderie as always.

You peel off your calf bandages first, admitting to yourself that none of the covers were actually needed for a medical reason. Just you being a little shit and wanting to savor the full effect of your owned body to some of the most important people in your life.

You name the people the tattoos are for as you reveal them.

Matt is the first to sob, of course, when he sees his sun and your dad’s quote. Then Keith inhales sharply when you reveal the Blades’ names among the other warriors. Lance bites his lip not to bawl when you tell him his flowers, and he and Hunk hug thigh when it comes to the lilies. Keith looks bashful for his and Shiro blinks as if he’s seeing you for the first time, his eyes flying over the tulips as if he couldn’t believe you’d get something for him.

Rover makes them all chuckle. The Altean mark is the last and when you look down, wow, that’s a lot of bandages indeed.

You turn to show off the Lions buttons and Green’s muzzle in your vines, and when you peek from behind your shoulder, they all look in some kind of awe.

Hunk gives you a proud thumbs up and you burst out laughing.

Keith says, “I wouldn’t fight you if I met you now for the first time,” and Lance nods enthusiastically.

“Pidgey, you look like you could kick all our collective asses.”

“I thought we already agreed she can,” Shiro jokes and Matt snorts in his shoulder.

You sigh. “A bunch of dorks, all of you.”

 

**_And if we're sinners, then it feels like heaven to me._**

 

You don’t completely dress up again. You wear your under-suit but only the legs, which you roll up anyway, and leave the upper part to pool in your lap when you sit down again, this time in the space between Lance’s crossed legs. You let the others check the design and the colors of each of your tattoos, and you let Shiro pass his Galra arm, that you finally re-activated, on one of his flowers on your shoulder. 

They’re all around you and you don’t feel boxed in. You feel like the last hydrogen bridge has been built, like the final atom fit in the construction. Green purrs in your mind and send you the image of a silver speck of cosmic dust fitting in to form her, to form Voltron, finally.

The feeling of incompleteness is gone. Now, you’re home, and everything is connected.

**Author's Note:**

> For whoever made it here, might I remind you of this great fanzine project I and a ton of other amazing writers and artists are apart of? Check it out at @talesofaltea.tumblr.com, seriously, guys, it's so worth it!
> 
> Also, is this purposeful or self-indulgent? Clearly the second.
> 
> My Tumblr is @agapantoblu.tumblr.com


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